America’s ‘Coolest Writer’ Woos Singapore

Novelist Michael Chabon speaks at the 2010 New Yorker Festival in New York City.

Wearing a shirt by cult-brand Penguin, with his pants rolled up at the ankles and a straw hat, Michael Chabon almost looks like a caricature of a Western novelist in Asia. Leaning back on a couch in an air-conditioned café, it was Mr. Chabon’s first time in Singapore – perhaps not the first place one would think of readers falling under the Jewish-American author’s usual fan base.

“I have no idea if I’m relevant or not,” said the 48-year-old screenwriter and Pulitzer-prize winning novelist in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It never occurred to me to wonder whether people in Gabon, Singapore or Russia are reading my works.”

Mr. Chabon, author of “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union” and “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay,” may be nonplussed about his global following, but his reception in Singapore – not particularly known for its literary culture – was befitting of his status as “the coolest writer in America” (as the Christian Science Monitor called him). His lecture, part of the Singapore Writers Festival 2011, which ran till the end of October, nearly sold out and was considered one of the festival’s highlights.

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Author Michael Chabon poses for a photo in New York in December 2010.

The lecture, called “Poe Biz” (not, in fact, “Hackwork: Using Craft to Sell Madness for Cash,” as it had been earlier advertized), drew inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe’s work and focused primarily on making art that can be sold – perhaps a sentiment that resonated among budding authors, particularly in financially driven Singapore.

“Mothers are right – you can’t really make a living from writing,” said Mr. Chabon, smiling a little. “Many parents [of novelists] would have still preferred if their children became doctors or lawyers… I suppose someone is just going to have to displease their parents.”

The novelist, too, wasn’t insulated from the notion that literature isn’t the most profitable profession. When his wife, fellow writer Ayelet Waldman, was pregnant, Mr. Chabon says he was struck with “provider panic,” which drove his foray in Hollywood, away from his comfort zone of writing essays and novels.

“I thought I’d sell a screenplay for a million dollars – that didn’t happen,” he half-joked when talking about his motivations for screenwriting. “It was mostly a financial thing at first—it does come with health insurance.”

Despite the critical acclaim of “Wonder Boys,” the 2000 film adapted from Mr. Chabon’s novel of the same title, the author’s own experience as a screenwriter has been hit or miss. Although his work on “Spiderman 2” in 2004 was well received, he didn’t work on its sequel. Many of his other screenplays, though bought, were never filmed. Mr. Chabon spent more than a year in the mid-2000s on a screen version of perhaps his best-known work, “Kavalier and Clay,” but the project, stuck in pre-production for years, never got off the ground.

Most recently, Scott Rudin, who worked with Mr. Chabon on “Spiderman,” purchased the film rights to “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” to be directed and adapted by the Coen brothers. In 2008, the film was reportedly in pre-production and was set to start filming after 2009.

The somewhat stunted Hollywood fanfare around Mr. Chabon’s work hasn’t damped his success as an author. Drawing on his Jewish-American identity and creating surreal, historical and often comic-book-infused novels, Mr. Chabon has become a hero for geeky young men across America.

“There is a certain core constituency that I appeal to – comic-book lovers, mostly men, and mostly young people,” said Mr. Chabon. “But as I’ve gotten older it’s become a much more diverse group.” At his Singapore Writers Festival appearance, one woman said she traveled to Singapore from her home in neighboring Malaysia to hear him speak.

Despite the fanfare, Mr. Chabon is quietly humble in his mannerisms and speech. He doesn’t think he has gotten better at writing over the years, saying he “still gets terribly lost” when writing.

“Sometimes I lose sense of why I wanted to begin the novel in the first place,” he said. “I was much cockier when I was younger.”

Perhaps the test will come when his latest novel, “Telegraph Avenue,” is released next fall – his first full novel since 2007. The novel is set in Berkeley, Calif., where Mr. Chabon currently lives with his family. Berkeley’s diversity, he says, inspires a lot of his work as a writer.

“Diversity is a very important part of what I value,” he said. Still, he thinks America is largely mono-cultural, and praised Singapore for its “totally different kind of diversity.”

“There are four incredibly rich traditions, histories, immigrant experiences and storytelling traditions,” said Mr. Chabon, referring to Singapore’s ethnically varied populations of Chinese, Indian, Malay and Eurasian ethnic groups. This make-up, he says, should be a fertile ground for a great literary tradition.

Still, critics have many complaints about the arts scene in Singapore – one many believe has been stymied by decades of strict government control and censorship.

Although the government plans to pump millions into the local arts scene – about $284 million over the next five years – some artists say state funding itself creates an infantile artistic culture, one that is forced to tow official policy.

Mr. Chabon – in quintessentially American way – has his own take on this.

“You could go back in time where great works of art give birth in horrible cultures of repression, and there are lots of mediocre works in free societies,” he said. “But I am a staunch supporter of the American Bill of Rights, and freedom of expression.

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